Mitt Romney, who said he didn't care about 47% of the US population. Photograph: Boston Globe/Getty Images

God bless America. Or, if you are Mitt Romney, only half of it. Satan can have the other half, for in Mormon teaching he is the brother of Jesus. What else can explain this parasitic 47% of which Romney speaks? The people who see themselves as victims for whom the government is responsible. The losers who believe "they are entitled to healthcare, to food, to housing, to you name it".

Christ almighty! What in the richest country are these people thinking? They shouldn't even have a vote, say the rightwing outliers, reversing a founding American principle, "No taxation without representation".

Romney is talking about federal income tax, and the non-partisan Tax Policy Centre showed that last year 46.6% of American households did not pay it. However – and this is a big however – two-thirds of them paid a combination of tax through their payroll, state, property and gas taxes. Tax breaks for the elderly, the working poor and an exemption for combat pay have been fairly uncontroversial.

The driving down of wages has meant that tax is used, in the words of Iain Duncan Smith, to "make work pay". It also subsidises childbearing, which the Republicans insist keeps down immigration.

Romney is a hopelessly rich, but oddly passive-aggressive politician. It is difficult for David Cameron's Tory government to align itself with this man, who has the charisma of a stained trouser press. Who wouldn't prefer the Obama Grooverama?

But they are, indeed, politically much more aligned with Romney and the truth is out there. It's there in the need to shift all talk of public responsibility to private responsibility. It's there in the dismissal of their own privilege, their inherited wealth and private education. Romney, at the same dinner at which he spoke of the 47%, talked of how he would be more electable if he were Mexican.

While he is obviously a dud, his core beliefs are significant in Britain because they are not far from how policy is being conceptualised. We too have the wealth-makers versus takers narrative. The takers – and this is always preceded with some guff about the truly vulnerable – are wasters and shirkers. They say they are poor, but blow their benefits on flat-screen TVs. The wealth-makers remain more mysterious. Are they bankers? Is it just Richard Branson? Or are they the small entrepreneurs who can only aspire to the greed of the Dragons in the ludicrous Dragons' Den? Does wealth creation mean purely profit? What of the third sector?

Any political party worth its salt needs to disrupt this narrative and soon. If we are to be divided into makers and takers, Romney-style, then, of course, the benefit freeze of "the takers" – the cutting of the link between benefits and inflation – is just fine and dandy.

But who exactly are the shirkers? Those who take without paying tax. Toddlers born into poverty. People who are very ill. Old people who can no longer work. Young people who cannot find employment. Yes, they are real people, but the Tories are using the recession to implement policies that are way closer to crazed Republican thinking than they would like spelled out. They are punitively and knowingly trying to refigure the relationship between voters and the state. Those on benefits are not considered Tory voters, but support for cuts to benefits comes when people feel they also have no relationship to welfare, that they never "take" while others do.

This is why child benefit becomes totemic – the only "benefit" people feel they get. Don't mention the war, roads or hospitals. If the takers can be defined as "other", popular support for this agenda continues. Those who push through these changes (politicians) and those who discuss them (the media) live mostly in a world of private provision of schools and healthcare, where the view that the poor are leeches with no sense of responsibility becomes acceptable.

The alternative to this – Miliband's vague musings on predatory capitalism was an attempt, I suppose – is to move the issue of responsibility into the heart of the debate. It is also to ask fundamentally what wealth is for. Even cheerleaders for business are talking about responsibility and relationships. They see in the crash the failings of crony capitalism and want something much more pro-market rather than pro-business, so an economist such as Luigi Zingales suggests structural reforms to break up these elites. The issue is that Romney represents these elites, as does our current cabinet.

So wealth creation is spoken about with no model of innovation, just more fetishisation of the past. Suddenly we are back to O-levels. Are businesses asking for rote-learning and regurgitation? No, they are asking for literacy, science, data analysis, Mandarin and creativity. It already seems a long time since Danny Boyle reminded us that we are quite good at some things, that the relationship of the taxpayer to the state is not only represented by "shirkers" but by nurses.

Talking of takers, the Tories have no mandate, and as voting turnout decreases, they are unlikely to get one. It's the same across the pond. As a Republican senator told the Washington Post: "We are not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term." The Tories need to grasp this, for while they may gasp at Romney's "gaffe", they do so because they see it as a failure of strategy – not of morality.